We’re Not in New York Anymore

In 1985, the novelist Elmore Leonard, in an introduction to a book of photographs by Balthazar Korab, offered this analysis of his home city of Detroit:

There are cities that get by on their good looks, offer climate and scenery, views of mountains or oceans, rockbound or with palm trees; and there are cities like Detroit that have to work for a living…. It’s never been the kind of city people visit and fall in love with because of its charm or think, gee, wouldn’t this be a nice place to live.

At that time, Detroit had lost seven hundred thousand residents from its population peak of about 1.8 million, in the nineteen-fifties. The city was not merely diminished—it was also in the process of diminishing further. In the nearly thirty years since, more than five hundred thousand more people have left. You know all the grim headlines: soaring crime, industrial decay, city services stretched dangerously thin, abandoned blocks, “urban prairies,” forced downsizing. This summer, the city filed for bankruptcy, and its remaining residents have been portrayed as hostages unable to make an escape. After years of bad news and bad press, Detroit seems more unlikely than ever to be a place about which anyone would say, “Gee, wouldn’t this be a nice place to live.”

But what if someone offered you a free house? In a contemporary, literary twist on old homesteading incentives, a new nonprofit organization called Write a House is refurbishing three two-bedroom houses in Detroit and accepting applications this spring for writers to move in, rent free. Poets, journalists, novelists, and anyone who falls somewhere in between are encouraged to apply. If the writers stay for the required two years and fulfill other obligations, such as engaging with the city’s literary community and contributing to the program’s blog, they’ll even get the deed to the place. As the group’s mission puts it, “It’s like a writer-in-residence program, only in this case we’re actually giving the writer the residence, forever.”

Two of the houses were bought for a thousand dollars each, and the third was donated by Power House Productions, a local community organization run by artists. All are within walking distance of each other, in a racially diverse neighborhood north of the city center. Write a House is currently in the early stages of raising thirty-five thousand dollars for each location in order to fund major renovations, like electrical and plumbing. The houses have cheerful names (Apple, Blossom, and Peach), but they still need a lot of work. Writers who are selected will have to put the finishing touches on their houses, and they will have to pay insurance and taxes on the property (estimated at about five hundred dollars a month). The group plans to expand to more properties in the future if this first round works out.

“It is a Detroit neighborhood, so not everything works perfectly,” Sarah Cox, a journalist and one of the organization’s co-founders, told me this week. “People who move here will have to be prepared for some boarded-up houses on their blocks. But you’ll get the opportunity to be part of a community, own a house, and see real change happening.”

Cox moved to Detroit from Brooklyn three years ago, and first lived in the same neighborhood where the Write a House rehab houses are located. She now owns a house in the city. The project’s other co-founder, Toby Barlow, who is a novelist and also works in advertising, has lived in the city for more than seven years. He also moved from Brooklyn. “I had just sold my first book, and was worried to be leaving what is considered the best ecosystem for writers,” Barlow told me. “But when I came to Detroit, I found that for me it was just as good, if not better. And certainly more affordable.”

For writers who are bunked up with roommates and forlorn about lack of square footage and rising rents, the financial math of Detroit looks pretty appealing, free house or not. But it goes beyond the numbers. In Brooklyn, and other expensive cities across the country, the real-estate market, with its exceptionally high prices for ownership, can lead to people feeling kept at a distance from their neighborhood, or, as Cox puts it, an “impermanent part of where they live.” For a renter feeling boxed in or left out in her current location, moving to Detroit might provide a creative spark. Write a House, however, is looking to draw people from not only America’s expensive coastal hubs but also from big or small towns all over the world. (They’ve already been contacted by several writers in Europe.) “Some communities are pricing people out, and other communities just aren’t that interesting,” Barlow said. “Detroit is affordable and fascinating, and that seems like a good combination for writers.”

In Detroit’s extended era of decay, projects like Write a House are the kinds of good-news stories that getnationalattention—small groups of people, often artists, organizing innovative projects whose larger-scale impacts on the city itself are hard to gauge. Three new writers won’t save Detroit, of course. Nor does the city’s recovery depend merely on the arrival young, artistic adventurers—its residents need much more than an economy based on hipness. But just as it is easy to gawk at Detroit from afar as a lost cause, a kind of “third world in America,” it is also too easy to be reflexively cynical about such projects, to mutter about gentrification and the myopia of so-called urban pioneers. One thing that outsiders may miss in the stories of Detroit, Barlow told me, was the intense spirit of coöperation among all kinds of people in the city who are just trying to make it a better place to live. Write a House offers an appealingly simple version of urban improvement—three houses, clean and freshly painted, and three writers, present and working.

Photograph: Andrew Kopietz/Write a House.

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and producer for newyorker.com. He lives in Maine.